Refusal is better described as an affine function than a direction

Marshall et al. generalize the linear direction-ablation account of refusal to an affine one, treating the projection coefficient as an affine function with a nonzero offset derived from the harmless-class mean rather than the origin [marshall-etal-2024] They argue purely linear methods give no guarantee the resulting vector lands in a meaningful location [marshall-etal-2024] Directional ablation alone breaks a non-transformer RWKV (Eagle) model into incoherent output, while their Affine Concept Editing (ACE), combining ablation with offset-based activation addition, fixes it [marshall-etal-2024] This contests the single-direction account and offers an alternative to the concept-cone account of the same phenomenon [marshall-etal-2024]